Environment

Photo: Photoviriya/Shutterstock
The global conversation on transport and mobility has evolved significantly over the past five years. Take transport and climate, for instance: although data on the carbon footprint of major transport modes had been available for a long time, it was not until COP21 in 2015 that mobility became a central part of the climate agenda. The good news is that, during that same period, the space of solutions expanded as well. For example, data sharing is now viewed as an obvious way to promote better integration between urban transport modes in cities.

In that context, the task at hand for the Sustainable Mobility for All initiative (SuM4All) was clear: How can we work with decision-makers and the international community to transform the conversation, harness the full potential of these emerging solutions, and take on the world’s most pressing mobility issues?

To tackle these challenges, the initiative decided to focus on three essential steps.

Buses, cyclist, and car traffic in Santiago de Chile. Photo: Claudio Olivares Medina/Flickr
Earlier this month, Santiago de Chile took delivery of 100 brand-new electric buses. The event was a first in the region, and impressive images of the state-of-the-art buses driving in convoy toward their new home in Chile’s capital city were shared by global media. These buses are part of a broader effort to tackle smog and revolutionize the city’s public transport system. By 2022, Chile aims to increase the number of electric vehicles in the country tenfold, which would put it in the vanguard of clean mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and amongst developing countries worldwide. These changes are expected to help the country meet its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) target, set in the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The target calls for a 30% reduction in GHG emissions per unit of GDP by 2030, with transportation being one of the main sectors for mitigation.

The story of Santiago, however, remains an exception in the region. Though Latin American countries, as signatories to the Paris Agreement, have signaled their concrete intention to embrace a low-carbon future, the transition to low and zero-emissions vehicles has been slow. To better understand the challenges in accelerating the adoption of clean technologies in LAC, the World Bank has recently implemented the Clean Bus project, funded by the NDC Support Facility, a contribution to the NDC Partnership.

A local bus in Luxembourg. Photo: Fränz Bous/Flickr
As discussions concluded at COP24, countries still struggle to translate their climate commitments into effective and socially acceptable actions. This sense of stagnation is particularly evident in transport. With 23% of energy-related GHG emissions coming from the sector, transitioning to greener mobility will be crucial to the overall success of the climate agenda. Yet the world remains largely reliant on fossil fuels to move people and goods from A to B. As shown in Sustainable Mobility for All’s Global Roadmap of Action, there are multiple policy options that could help countries move the needle on green mobility, each with their own fiscal and political costs. To illustrate this, let’s look at three countries that did take concrete measures to cut carbon emissions from transport but opted for three different options: France, Luxembourg, and Norway.

What these countries have in common

These three countries all have a high level of income, which means the majority of their residents can afford to buy and own a car. The governments of these countries have also invested heavily into road and rail systems—including France’s transformative high-speed railway network. This effort has significantly increased the number of people who have access to fast and reliable transport, and helped bridge the social divide between urban and rural areas.

But “universal access” is only one of the four policy goals to achieve sustainable mobility: efficiency, safety, and green mobility are equally important. Now that the infrastructure is in place, and carbon-intensive cars and trucks are on the roads, the challenge for policy-makers is to figure out how we can reach these three other goals in a world where individual mobility has become a new “social right”. In other words, which policies will be most effective for reducing the environmental footprint of the current mobility system (GHG emissions, noise, and air pollution)?

Photo: Bernard Spragg/Flickr
Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change drew global attention by providing fresh and overwhelming evidence about the urgency of the climate situation. According to the agency’s latest report, global temperatures will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within the next 12 years—unless we act now.

Transport bears a huge responsibility in the current situation: the sector contributes to nearly a quarter of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, and 18% of all manmade emissions in the global economy. Under a business-as-usual scenario, this figure will continue rising to reach 1/3 of all emissions by 2040.

This means cutting emissions from transport will be central to solving the climate equation. To kickstart this process, the Sustainable Mobility for All initiative (Sum4All) just released a preliminary Global roadmap of action towards sustainable mobility that lays out concrete policy measures for a healthier transport future. Our coalition of 55 leading public and private organizations looks at all dimensions of sustainability: safety, efficiency, equitable access, and, of course, environmental impact.

As global leaders head to Poland for the COP24 Climate Conference, now is a good time to identify the most effective solutions for lowering the carbon footprint of transport. In that spirit, we encourage all interested parties to provide input and feedback on SuM4All’s Roadmap of Action: Which policy interventions do you think should be prioritized? Are there any critical measures that are missing from the proposal? How can the private sector be part of the solution?

When our team started working in Freetown one year ago, we found very limited data on how people move or what are the public transport options to access jobs and services from different neighborhoods. How do you plan your public transport system when you do not have data? And what if you are also constrained by a highly vulnerable environment to natural disasters and poverty? Keep reading: Disruptive thinking has the answer.

Context

Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city, is a vibrant city with an increasing population and a growing economy—and probably the best beaches in the region. It is a densely populated, congested city situated on a hilly peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the estuary of the Sierra Leone River and mountains, with very little flat space. The city creates 30% of the country’s GDP, which evidences the importance for the national economy. Although Freetown is the main employment center in Sierra Leone, the access to jobs and services in the city is heavily impaired by inadequate transport services and infrastructure and a chronic congestion.

Photo: Phil Wong/Flickr
In case you haven’t heard, plastic straws are bad news for the planet. This much was made clear over the summer as a surge of anti-straw sentiment spread across many countries. News channels all over the world highlighted how this small and light piece of hollow plastic has been contaminating the oceans and posing a risk to the environment. Outcry was swift and decisive. Practically overnight, countless individuals vowed never to use them again. Even beverage industry giant Starbucks decided to eliminate plastic straws by 2020!

Interestingly, straws make up a fairly small share of the overall plastic pollution in our oceans, especially compared to other sources of plastic waste such as fishing nets and gear. Still, every small piece of plastic that does not end up contaminating the environment is a win. But what’s truly remarkable here is how the global community rallied behind a simple and impactful change, and then followed through with it.

The whole campaign about plastic straws and the quick reaction that ensued got me thinking about what a “plastic straw moment” could look like for the transport sector. What small change can we all take to get the world to rally behind transport?

Would you imagine having to evacuate your village by boat because the only road that takes you to your school and brings the goods is flooded?

In February 2018, the fiction became reality for some residents in the province of Salta, northern Argentina, after heavy rains caused the Bermejo and Pilcomayo river to overflow. The flooding resulted in one fatality, required the evacuation of hundreds of residents, and washed a segment of Provincial Route 54, leaving the village of Santa Victoria del Este completely stranded.

Similarly, a segment of National Route 5 in one of the main corridors of Mercosur has been impassable for more than a year because the level of the Picassa lagoon keeps rising due to extreme rainfall and lack of coordination among provinces on how to deal with excess water flows. The expansion of the lagoon is forcing 4,000 vehicles a day to make a 165-km detour, and adds one transit day for the 1,560 freight trains running every year between Buenos Aires and Mendoza. The flooding is dragging the economy behind and inflating already high logistics costs.

As a matter of fact, a recent World Bank study put the cost of damages and disruptions like these at an estimated 0.34% of GDP a year for riverine flooding, plus 0.32% of the GDP for urban flooding.

To address these risks, Argentina’s Ministry of Transport started a dialogue with the World Bank to explore ways of reducing the vulnerability of the network.

Output and performance based road contracts (OPRC) is a contracting modality that is increasingly being used to help manage roads. Unlike traditional contracts, where the owners define what is to be done, and oftentimes how to do it, OPRC contracts define the outcome that the owners want to achieve, and the contractor is responsible to meet those outcomes. Performance is measured against a series of key performance indicators (KPIs) or service levels.

Critical to the success of any OPRC contract is the assignment of risk between parties. Climate change has major implications for OPRC contracts because it affects the risk exposure of both parties. With funding from the Public Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF), a new analysis considered how to incorporate climate change risks into OPRC contracts.

What’s Happening Right Now?

Without clear expectations around climate risk, neither the asset owner nor the companies bidding for performance contracts will adequately address the risks. Bidders cannot be held accountable for risks that are not specifically cited or linked with performance criteria.

At present, climate change risks are generally carried by the asset owner through the Force Majeure provisions of the contract, and treated as ‘unforeseen’ events, with repair costs reimbursed to the contractor. This impacts the overall cost of the OPRC, and where extreme weather events are becoming common-place, reduces the efficacy of OPRC as a contracting modality. The most pressing issues challenging stakeholders during each phase of development are summarized in this chart.

Photo: UN Women/Flickr
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 17,500 islands, is the fourth most populous country in the world, with 261 million inhabitants, and the largest economy in Southeast Asia, with a nominal Gross Domestic Product of $933 billion.

Central government spending on transport increased by threefold between 2010-2016. This has enabled the country to extend its transport network capacity and improve access to some of the most remote areas across the archipelago.

The country has a road network of about 538,000 km, of which about 47,000 km are national roads, and 1,000 km are expressways. Heavy congestion and low traffic speeds translate into excessively long journey times. In fact, traveling a mere 100 km can take 2.5 to 4 hours. The country relies heavily on waterborne transport and has about 1,500 ports, with most facilities approaching their capacity limits, especially in Eastern Indonesia. Connectivity between ports and land infrastructure is limited or non-existent. The rail network is limited (6,500 km across the islands of Java and Sumatra) and poorly maintained. The country’s 39 international and 191 domestic airports mainly provide passenger services, and many are also reaching their capacity limits.

Credit: Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory
On October 4, 2016, category 4 Hurricane Matthew struck the southern part of Haiti. Strong winds and rain triggered heavy flooding and landslides that resulted in 500 fatalities, along with widespread infrastructure damage and economic loss. The hurricane caused the collapse of the Ladigue Bridge, a vital asset connecting the southern peninsula of Haiti to the capital city and the rest of the country. The collapse left 1.4 million people completely isolated, making it extremely hard to deliver the aid and humanitarian assistance they needed. Overall damage and losses were equivalent to 32% of GDP, with transport accounting for almost a fifth of the total.

Haiti is among the countries that are most vulnerable to natural disasters including hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes—the result of a combination of factors that include high exposure to natural hazards, vulnerable infrastructure, environmental degradation, institutional fragility, and a lack of adequate investment in resilience. In Haiti, 80% of people and goods are transported by road. First aid and humanitarian resources, often concentrated in Port-au-Prince, need to transit through congested and sometimes inaccessible roads to reach affected areas. In that context, strengthening and building resilient infrastructure is key.

Since 2008, the World Bank has supported the reconstruction of 15 major bridges and stabilized 300 kilometers of roads to enhance the resilience of Haiti’s transport network. One of the most significant innovations that came out of this effort was the adoption of standardized emergency bridges that can be assembled within 2- 3 months from pre-designed and interchangeable components.